it's. here's mitt romney trying to figure out the name of that thing that we americans call a donor. i'm sorry i'm just a guy who cares an awful lot about my country you sir are a fool you know what that is my terror cells. no one wishing to feature is on the on the liberal and the christian public. can really go to the.

stone on you guys i am not a martin so then i learned some interesting news the u.s. along with its allies have just launched the largest naval exercise in the middle east and the strait of hormuz because they say that they need practice keeping the shipping lanes open practice right let me decode that for you us and company are up in arms literally over a hypothetical threat made by iran which said if provoked it would lay mines the vista to egypt waterways of the middle east so what if the us decide to do simple let's round up the troops let me give you a breakdown of what they've got a naval force includes three us carrier groups each of which has an aircraft more than the entire iranian air force the same carriers are supported by at least twelve battleships ballistic missile cruisers destroyers and assault ships carrying thousands of u.s. marines and special forces and what iran sent in return pretty much all they could

just one submarine so let me ask you a question who is threatening whom i'm sick and tired of these bluff calling war games that have no purpose other than perpetuate and instigate a war that the us is supposedly working hard to deter and that is why breaking the set. large scale demonstrations against the west have been building across the muslim world since the release of an internet film portraying the prophet mohammad and a derogatory and offensive way unsurprisingly a prominent narrative resound in the establishment following the wave of protests is of so we've been generalisations that you know what you just see i talk to intelligence people all week and they hate us because of their religion they hate us because they're called truly hate us because of peer pressure we are the spark

our existence our way of life is one long spark they want to extinguish that spark so we need to stop worrying about what sparks what and focus on protecting our citizens from this prehistoric evil as hillary clinton said these acts are confounding true it is confounding how unprotected our embassies are what's not confounding are the attackers motives they hate us what kind of sense you have about who exactly they are are they part of an organized group or they just young men looking for trouble. by and large they seem to be young men looking for trouble really scarborough and fox they don't want to extinguish our way of life they just want to stop extinguishing their lives have any of these news commentators read about the history of u.s. foreign policy and interventionism in these regions for the last century the other resound in line in the media has been one of utter perplexity how could they hate is when the us has been helping to spread democracy to these very same countries

check out this clip from n.b.c.'s richard engel reporting from egypt it is somewhat ironic that most american diplomats it's out of the embassy helped to give these demonstrators these protesters all a voice and allowed them to actually carry out this anti-american clashes that we're seeing right now so the u.s. gave a voice for protesters in egypt i think many would disagree with what ingles deem so ironic considering how the u.s. is one of the biggest allies to the brutal dictator hosni mubarak for decades given over two billion dollars in foreign aid every year since one nine hundred seventy nine the u.s. didn't take the line of the egyptian revolution and till it was already happening then when the revolution was underway egyptians were brutalized i mean freed with usa made tear gas canisters by mubarak security forces as mike prysner answer coalition organizer has so eloquently stated he said muslims are not culturally

backwards for attacking us embassies americans are culturally backwards for not understanding why. now i think that the militant response is only due to an inflammatory film is extremely naive and tense hostility toward the us long predates this film and the reasons are hardly difficult to recognize prize or goes on to explain in a recent editorial these protests can only be understood by taking into account the historic role of a period lism which is left a deep reservoir of anger toward the united states and other colonizers some of the actions have been invasion of iraq support for brutal military dictatorships armenian funding israel for its nonstop war and occupation of the palestinian people the tourists illegal torture and endless drone warfare which targets civilians only by analyzing the backdrop of colonial violence in these regions can set a light on how and why these things occur but in large part the historical and contextual

amnesia of colonialism and imperialism is completely absent from the mainstream narratives and these networks are just drooling at the mouth to be given a chance to push their familiar line of how evil and ungrateful these people are and how necessary the war on terror is to keep fighting the commentators and politicians look at these protests unfolding and point to them as a sign of collapse and destabilization of their prehistoric societies but interestingly very similar things have been happening right here in the u.s. check out some of the footage i got teargassed multiple times for during the occupy oakland crackdowns late last year is it just me or does this look familiar to you so you can't forget the unrest brewing in our country because we too have a breakdown in society which will only get worse as the gap continues to widen between the rich and the poor yet you don't see much paid to aarp much attention paid to our police state the spirit of revolt and the instability here at home. and

while corporate outlets have been all too focused on the unruly protests across the middle east the anniversary of occupy wall street has sparked another wave of protests and militarized crackdowns in new york city where get this one hundred eighty one demonstrators have already been arrested including many for simply filming or sitting so instead of focusing on how these middle eastern countries are falling apart at the seams because they're culturally backward maybe the establishment should look at the glaring fact that this country is falling apart at the seams as we speak and maybe they should work to fix the a new mobile wrongs plaguing the people who live here before escalates to the point where the unrest could no longer be marginalized organ org. or the suburbs.

so yesterday was the anniversary of the occupy wall street movement but today's another special anniversary is on this day all the way back an eight hundred fifty one the new york times newspaper was born and since then it's become the most highly acclaimed newspaper in the world you may recall its famous motto that can always be found on the left hand corner of the front page it reads all the news that's fit to print but is it always all the news that's fit to print or there are bits of truth slipping through the cracks well our next guest is a former journalist who just wrote his book exploring his recent journey and exploits the one track narrative the new york times tried to push on him and thereby millions of american readers joining me now from our l.a. studio is daniel simpson is a former reporter for the new york times and author of a rough guide to the dark side. thank you so much for joining me daniel you know here you are you get this job as a foreign news correspondent for the new york times. you know dream job right was

there a turning turning point for you when you just said you know am i just a paddler for propaganda what was that. well for me i suppose the penny dropped quite quickly i was quite fortunate i joined the times at a time when everything was really quite open and in terms of seeing what was wrong with that institution when i was young and naive an idea idealistic i suppose i thought i was going to be holding people in power to account and it turned out instead that when i joined in two thousand and two new york times was very much engaged in doing exactly what those in power wanted them to do and printing fake intelligence information to start the war in iraq and i was in a part of the world the balkans former yugoslavia where there was no longer much interest in hearing about what was happening on the ground except once in a while i was supposed to write stories about been responsible for breaking up yugoslavia by supporting wars of aggression that didn't need to happen based on

fake intelligence and manufactured enemies so i was watching what i was supposed to say about something that happened ten years ago being repeated by the united states government in the pages of my newspaper which was denying me any space to write about what i saw happening on the ground or what i thought about american foreign policy so it seemed pretty glaringly obvious to me that the news fit to print was pretty much the news that's fit to serve the powerful. the. next question and one expert excerpt of your book daniel you talk about the paper post nine eleven and you say you know while americans were asking each other why do they hate us you said that the new york times mostly asked the white house who'd get bombed and talk about you know you were in serbia reporting. you know you just you just basically said that they were feeding you predetermine line of propaganda and narrative that kind of fit the mold why why were they doing this. well with regard to serbia was very simple and they had a very fixed view of the situation based on what had happened in the one nine

hundred ninety s. when there had been some really gruesome wars taking place on european soil and they had come to some pretty fixed ideas about who was responsible for those wars and they were they were not interested in analyzing the effects that subsequently western involvement had on those conflicts at the time i got there by you know two thousand and two this is all ancient history to them so they have their fix narrative line which basically establishes the u.s. as the good guys have gone in to fix the problem and has absolutely no interest of course in looking at how not only is the problem not been fixed but new problems have been caused by this intervention whether it be bombing serbia in one thousand nine hundred nine of the cost of or even the way in which the intervention in bosnia took place that basically divided the country and meant that the war at some point could yet restart because nothing's really been resolved. and you know i tried to write about these things in a tentative nuanced why that you're allowed to when you're critiquing american foreign policy in the paper and even that was tough to get past that it is and yet at the same time there were all these extraordinarily credulous lines that were

being peddled about you know the supposed weapons of mass destruction program in iraq and i was actually asked at one point to invent one myself from the balkans an initially by the american embassy in belgrade but also backed up by a reporter at the times judith miller who wanted me to say that serbs were selling saddam hussein weapons of mass destruction delivery systems now it turned out that what they were actually selling was spare parts for planes and so the only real plausible explanation for these might be useful would be to put those aging planes back in the sky where they've been banned from being for the past twelve years while the u.s. went about bombing iraq on a fairly regular basis to ensure there was no such thing as an iraqi defense when it came to the time that the u.s. would we would next pick up that war that left off in the early one nine hundred ninety s. so you know basically the americans could have made a case that yet. helping iraq get its act for example but instead they were looking for every possible way of getting this weapons of mass destruction story into the into the news media and the washington post very very very keenly jumped on that

line and so i came under enormous pressure from my bosses to to start looking at it the same way and i couldn't see any evidence that they in that daniel so i try to say well i see it this way also famously the new york times sat on the bush wiretapping story for over a year and yet i mean definitely eighteen you know peddling this propaganda to aid in a legal and immoral war dan i think a lot of people look at the new york times and other publications and they say you know how how could all of that be censored there are so many people it's a huge industry there's so many people who want to get the truth out care about getting the truth out where you say it's top down i mean are journalists trying to get stories out and they're just censored from the top how does this how does this like element i mean there are sharp work there. there are different processes at work but i can only speak from my own experience and i can see it in myself i was you know i was a very young man who wanted to get ahead and i was offered

a job at the new york times at the age of twenty seven so i was very ambitious and in a way i was just so disgusted by the situation the that i didn't want to play the game anymore i mean i've been very keen to play the game in my career up till that point and i think most journalists are painfully aware of how many people are breathing down their necks and so you learn you internalize these these little phrases that you apply to other countries like serbia is nationalist or engage in extremist policies but you know the united states is never doing those things of course and you wouldn't put them in a story you'd never frame a story that says the united states started a war of aggression but is instead engaged in a foreign policy so the project or you would talk about harsh interrogation techniques opposed to torture you know these are things that people have learned to do but there's another thing that comes into this much much more serious and i think it explains why nothing really changed i mean forget the times did say sorry for some of its w m d coverage a few years back but hasn't really changed its policy because the way that the papers senior staff think is exactly like those in power in fact is their job to

become their friends and howell raines the editor were not when i was you know he wrote a long article after he lost his job in two thousand and four where he said that you know great length i think basically the new york times is the in this pencil needs lexer of the united states and the political governmental academic and professional communities as a basically he sees his newspaper as a beingness a propaganda megaphone for. it has indeed become essentially a propaganda megaphone when you see just the reprinting of press releases of the establishment line thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story daniel simpson former reporter for new york times. now if you like what you see so far go to our you tube channel at youtube dot com breaking the set and subscribe to our facebook page at facebook dot com forward slash breaking a threat give us a like. in a more intelligent mind if you're not a troll and not a hater feel free to write me i love you know you think and if you're wondering

about what i'm doing or bitching about when i'm not on air follow me on twitter at abby martin l.a. take a break my preaching for now but stay tuned to hear about the school of america's next.

thanks. let me tell you about a place you may not have heard of if you ever heard of the school of americas or maybe by its more recent name when sec western hemisphere institute for security

cooperation if you haven't that's ok it's not exactly the most well known organization but maybe it should be school of america is a u.s. defense this is your show and fort benning georgia that trains military personnel from across latin america the school's curriculum for its thousands of international graduates allegedly promotes democratic values and respect for human rights graduates that ironically include some of latin america's most notorious human rights violators well since one thousand nine hundred nonprofit organization called school of america's watch has been working to monitor and maintain a database of graduates who have been responsible for human rights violations last april a group of five activists including father roy birdwatch the founder of the organization were arrested in front of the u.s. capitol after a demonstration demanding that the school be closed. my producers were able to catch up with father berg while just this morning before his trial here's a clip of what he had to say. his name in the united states secrets we know very

little about us foreign policy but this school of the americas now called the western hemisphere institute for security cooperation is really a symbol of what our foreign policy has been all about in latin america for decades basically. protecting our economics it self interest it's about how exporting cheap labor and their resources and we have a lot ourselves with militaries who have been very very oppressive toward their people. well the world makes a good point here our biggest enemy in this country is in fact ignorance but when seconds been under scrutiny for years in one thousand nine hundred six the pentagon was forced to release training manuals used at the school of america's before the name was changed the manuals advocated targeting civilians extrajudicial executions torture false imprisonment and extortion yet those are the values that this us

schools been promoting for the u.s. military is counterparts in latin america here check this out u.s. army major joseph blair who's a former official at the school once said quote the doctrine that was taught was that if you want information you use physical abuse you use false imprisonment you use threats to family members you use virtually any method necessary to get what you want and if you can't get the information you want if you can't get that person to shut up or stop doing what they're doing you simply assessment them and you assassinate them with one of your death squads yet that's just professor blair explaining the syllabus so is it any wonder that the former u.s. congressman joseph kennedy once said that the u.s. army of school america is a school that has run more dictators than any other school in the history of the world but hey that's ok since when maintains the no school should be held

accountable for the actions of its graduates the father bird was efforts to raise awareness are paying off several lot american countries have already declared they will be cutting ties with the school check it out. in the last two months two countries after we've met with their presidents president or president don you know korea. they go and nicaragua these two presidents in the last two months and this school and their work is causing a lot of kara a lot of suffering and death to our people it should not exist we are withdrawing our troops from the school. there have actually been attempts by congress to shut down the school a bill in two thousand and five aiming to abolish the school had one hundred thirty four co-sponsors in the house armed services committee but it failed in two thousand and seven the mcgovern lewis amendment was an attempt to remove funding from the school but was just six votes short of passing seems that moral arguments for closing down the school always seem to fall short and protestors are having

a hard time getting their voices heard listen one of the defendants for this morning's trial had to say about their attempts to reach lawmakers. the thing is that here in this country that we're supposed to be able to march down the street freedom of expression the fact that we are blocked off in front of congress where the decisions are made about this country shows you know the complacency it shows that the u.s. government has something to hide and their foreign policy that our voices aren't being able to be heard loud and clear. the bottom line is that not only we know that the united states and gauges and torture but the practice that we openly promote through international military training facilities on american soil what's worse is that this is easily one of the biggest and most underreported problems help us talk more about the school of americas and u.s. foreign policy in latin america and you and i are two producer rachel kurz is. coming on so how is it that this school is continuing to operate when it's

literally birthing consecutive generations of military dictators in these countries sure it will from the perspective of politicians in the united states they really have very little reason not to continue the school of the americas and as we've seen it's flourished under both republican and democratic presidents alike so it's really a bipartisan issue that both parties can get behind in terms of the latin american countries that continue to fail these schools with their students what we're seeing is that it's really a self-perpetuating issue what happens is people who have been trained at the school of the americas then say into positions of power. and go on to send their underlings to go join the school of the americas and the cycle just continues on and on like that. yeah it's really interesting isn't it that we are training these . repressive dictators essentially and then consecutively just more generations are trained in that fight fueling the fire but this past summer actually door and

nicaragua actually just said that they would no longer send their citizens the school america so is this a good sign that the countries are finally saying we're not going to participate in them or in the us i mean what do you think about that sure well i think it's always a good sign if there are some countries saying ok we're done here no more but let's look at the countries that are finally saying no we're talking about ecuador in nicaragua two countries that for quite some time have position themselves as pretty anti what they call a junkie and so essentially we're looking at daniel ortega in nicaragua he actually helped start a revolt against a u.s. backed dictator as part of the sandinistas that was successful in one nine hundred seventy nine he's been in power the sandinistas have been in power for a good portion of the period since then and they've still been sending people to the school of the americas i mean that boggles the mind and then look at rafael correa who just said earlier this summer decided no more sending people to the school of the americas korea's been more famous recently for positioning himself against western powers most recently in deciding to give julian assange and. you

know as i let me exactly so what we're seeing is if these are the countries that are only now decades and decades after the school of the americas founded saying no more i mean any progress is progress but it's kind of depressing that these countries so on especially not as. states i want to show you a map this is kind of a map of the last couple decades of increased and u.s. military installations and interventions in latin america most most arduous all you know in central america right here you know. two countries which have sent the most students to the school of americas colombia and honduras and they've also seen huge increases and u.s. military intervention troops on the ground and you know all the name of the drug war of course rachel but you know. in hindsight or not. in reality i mean look at these countries their situations are terrible i mean arguably the two of the most

violent countries in the entire world what is going on here well i think that these are two countries that depend pretty heavily on u.s. aid and in order to get that usaid it's not like we're giving away money for free here you have to start toeing the party line and we've seen that time and again where people's aid is threatened as soon as they start saying you know maybe we're not going to send students here this year maybe we're not going to allow u.s. troops to come in and do whatever they like and maybe we're not going to our own officers to torture civilians so i think that when you're looking at these countries that depend on the united states for economic and military aid you're going to see that they're going to keep sending those students there why do you think that so many people don't realize i mean here's the u.s. is branding the schools necessary even saying that's all the only names of promoting democracy and human rights but we're pretty much exploiting torture systematically at this school wrap it up really quickly because we're almost out of time but i mean how is this and u.s.

interests promoting torture well we've seen it time and again people are branding it used to be anti-communism an effort that well communism is an evil we need to get rid of that and then it was anti terrorism which we're still kind of dealing with we need to get rid of that anti-drug terrorism same thing it's going to be the war on insert your social ill here and that is going to be what the school of the americas is saving people from the next recovery yes so i have devoted. you know all this is made me think what would have happened if we broke the silence earlier if others have rallied along with father brick wall when you could became a martyr for the cause over twenty years ago how many lives could have been saved father because latest publication he stresses three important words silence is complicity yet this is merely an echo of the civil rights hero martin luther king who once said who have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good. people and he's right you see because we always have a choice a choice to be silent or

a choice to be her choice to admonish the wrongdoings of our leaders or become complicit by not speaking out what do you choose. to believe. don't tell me how much of my. coming out to place. blame.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lengthly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture. world with. science technology innovation all the latest developments from around russia we've got the future covered. download the official.